One of the more stinging criticisms that opposition politicians have levelled against President William Ruto’s administration, is that key political leaders in government are busy playing politics, while the dark shadow of famine looms over the land.
And it is true enough that there is nothing more humiliating for any national leadership in any country than that citizens of that country died of hunger on their watch. Indeed, any talk of “development” is meaningless, so long as there is famine in any corner of a country. And no leaders of the 21st century can disregard the impacts of a famine, if and when one occurs.
Such was not always the case.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, terrible famines of a kind we cannot imagine these days occurred with some frequency.
Among the truly epic famines recorded in the history of the last 150 years or so is the Great Irish Famine (1845-1849) also known as the Irish Potato Famine. It reduced the population of that island by about 25 per cent, with more than 1 million dying and about 2 million people fleeing the famine through mass emigration.
Far worse however was the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961, characterised as the deadliest famine ever, and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history. It had an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15-55 million): in any disaster on this scale precise numbers are impossible to pin down.
Closer to home, Ethiopia has been plagued by regular famines for well over a century, with perhaps the most devastating being the famine of 1984-1985, which had a death toll of approximately 1.2 million, and also resulted in more than 400,000 refugees fleeing the country and about 2.5 million people internally displaced.
You may well ask: What has any of this got to do with Kenya? After all, even though we do have occasional famines, they are nowhere near as devastating as these epic historical famines. Also, food aid from the likes of the World Food Programme is usually delivered quite quickly once a famine is declared a national emergency.
The answer to this question comes from yet another historic famine, the Bengal Famine in India, of 1943, which was later studied in great depth by one of the great minds of our time, the Indian economist (and Nobel Prize winner in economics) Amartya Sen.
This famine led to roughly 3 million deaths, and yet the surprising finding of Prof Sen’s research was, “This staggering loss of life was unnecessary…” and he provided “data [proving] that there was an adequate food supply in Bengal at the time”
To quote further, “…Sen revealed that in many cases of famine, food supplies were not significantly reduced. In Bengal, for example, food production, while down on the previous year, was higher than in previous non-famine years. Sen points to a number of social and economic factors, such as declining wages, unemployment, rising food prices, and poor food distribution, which led to starvation.”
At this point it surely must be obvious to any reader why this brief overview of famines globally is relevant to Kenya.
For here too, we have the threat of famine going hand in hand with bumper harvests in parts of the Rift Valley.
To that extent, even though the direct cause of the looming famine in Northern Kenya, is the failure of expected annual rains for four consecutive years, leading to unprecedented drought, when it comes to the looming famine itself – the people who have either died or may yet die for lack of food – we can argue that the famine is very much “man-made”.
This threat of impending famine is a problem not so much one of a lack of sufficient food within our borders, or any reluctance on the part of foreign donors to come to our aid.
It is a problem of government policy and of transport, logistics, and forward planning.
Famine, when it occurs in Kenya, tends to strike most often in the sparsely populated and historically marginalised Northern Kenya.
There is a direct link between this sparse population and its historical marginalisation: Its voting power is of little consequence in national politics.
